Vol. 8 No. 4

“Jazz isn’t dead,” Frank Zappa says, “it just smells funny.” Truer words were never spoken by a perennial winner of Downbeat popularity polls and one of the few remaining progressives left in jazz or rock.

Frank Zappa has become a sort of American underground institution. He first tumbled onto and into the consciousness of the masses in the mid-1960s as one of the original Mothers of Invention. The Mothers had a freakiness which the pop music listeners of the time didn’t quite know how to handle. One magazine, attempting to categorize all the major rock bands, dumped the Mothers, along with the Fugs, into the category of “Crotch Rock.” (read more)